Holland shrugged and pushed dirty blond hair back from his forehead. “Paddy Hayes died just after eleven- thirty last night,” he said.
“How’s the son doing?”
“He was pretty upset beforehand. Wrestling with it, you know? Once he’d decided, once they turned off the machines, he seemed a lot calmer.”
“Probably only seemed.”
“Probably…”
“When’s he going home?”
“He’s getting a train back up north this morning,” Holland said. “He’ll be getting home around the time they start the PM on his old man.”
“Won’t be too many surprises there.”
They both leaned back in their chairs as the tea arrived with very little ceremony. The fat man plonked down two sets of cutlery, wrapped in paper serviettes. He pointedly nudged a laminated menu toward each of them before turning to empty the ashtray on the adjoining table.
“You hungry?” Holland asked.
The man opposite glanced up from the menu he was already studying. “Not really. I had a huge plate of smoked salmon and scrambled eggs first thing.” His eyes went back to the menu. “Of course I’m fucking hungry.”
“All right…”
“I hope you’ve brought your checkbook. This could get expensive.”
Holland picked up his tea. He cradled the mug against his chin and let the heat drift up to his face. He stared through the narrow curtain of steam at the disheveled figure sitting across from him. “I still can’t get used to this,” he said.
“What?”
“This. You.”
“ You can’t get used to it? Jesus!”
“You know what I mean. I just never imagined you anything like this. You were the last person… You are the last person…”
Tom Thorne dropped his menu and crossed stained fingers above it. The decision made. He stared hard across the table.
“Things change,” he said.
TWO
Lots of things had changed…
What everything was bloody well called for a start. When he’d returned to work, it had seemed to Thorne that in the short time he’d been away they’d decided to change the name of just about everything. The Serious Crime Group, in which Thorne had been a detective inspector on one of the nine Major Investigation Teams in Murder Command (West), was now part of what had laughably been christened the Specialist Crime Directorate. Directorate, for crying out loud. Did the people who pushed pens around and decided these things really think that changing something’s name made a scrap of difference to what it actually did?
Directorate, group, pool, squad, team, unit… posse, gang, shower, whatever.
Just a bunch of people, of mixed ability, scrabbling around in various degrees of desperation, trying to catch those who had killed. Who were still killing.
Or, if they were really lucky, those who were planning to kill.
The Specialist Crime Directorate. Thorne remembered a vacancy advertised by a well-known supermarket in something called “ambient replenishment.” The job had turned out to be stacking shelves.
Naturally, the structure Thorne came back to had changed as well. Each MIT on the Murder Squad was now composed of three detective inspectors, each at the head of a smaller, core team and each with that much more paperwork, that much more administrative responsibility, and that much more time spent behind a desk. Each with another few hours of their working life spent ensuring that staff morale was high while levels of sick leave stayed low, and that actions were carried out within those very necessary constraints of bloody time and sodding budget, and so fucking on and so fucking forth
…
“I know this stuff has all got to be done, and I know it’s got to be done properly, but there have to be priorities. Don’t there? For Christ’s sake, I’ve got two Asian kids with bullets in their heads and some nutcase who seems to take great delight in sticking a sharpened bicycle spoke into people’s spines, but I’m being prevented from getting out and doing anything about it.”
“Listen…”
“Every time I so much as set foot outside the office, one or other of my so-called colleagues starts bitching about having to do my share of the fucking paperwork and it’s getting stupid. I just want to do the job, you know? Especially now. You can understand that, can’t you? I’m just a copper, that’s all. It’s not complicated. I’m not a resource, or a facilitator, or a fucking homicidal-perpetration-prevention-operative…”
“Tom…”
“Do you think whoever shot those two kids is sitting at home doing his paperwork? Is this lunatic I’m trying to catch filling in forms? Making a careful note, no, making several copies of a careful note about how many different bicycle spokes he’s used, and how much they cost him, and exactly how long it took him to get them just sharp enough to paralyze somebody? I don’t think so. I don’t fucking think so…”
The man sitting in the armchair wore his usual black hooded top and combats. There was a selection of rings and studs in both ears, and the spike below his bottom lip shifted as he moved his tongue around in his mouth. Dr. Phil Hendricks was a pathologist who worked closely with Thorne’s team. He was also the nearest thing Tom Thorne had to a best friend. Violent death and its charged aftermath had forged a strong bond between them. He’d caught a taxi to the flat in Kentish Town as soon as Thorne had called.
Hendricks waited just long enough to be sure that Thorne had run out of steam, without giving him the time to get up another head. “How are you sleeping?” he asked.
Thorne had stopped pacing, had sat down heavily on the arm of the sofa. “Do I sound tired to you?”
“You sound… hyper. It’s understandable.”
Thorne jumped up again, marched across to the fireplace. “Don’t start that lowering-your-voice shit, Phil. Like I’m not well. I’m right about this.”
“Look, I’m sure you’re right. I’m not there enough to see it.”
“Everything’s different.”
“Maybe it’s you that’s different…”
“Trust me, mate, this job’s going tits up. It’s like working in a bank in there sometimes. Like working in the fucking City!”
“What happened when you saw Jesmond?”
Thorne took a deep breath, placed the flat of his hand against his chest, watched it jump. Once, twice, three times…
“I got a lecture,” he said. “Apparently, these days, there’s a lot less tolerance for deadwood.”
Lots of things had changed…
Hendricks shifted in the armchair, opened his mouth to speak.
“Deadwood,” Thorne said, repeating the words as if they were from a foreign language. “How fucked is that from him? Pointless, tight-arsed tosser!”
“Okay, look, he’s all those things, we know that, but… maybe the caseload is getting on top of you a bit. Don’t you think? Come on, you’re not really dealing with the work properly, with any of it.”
“Right, and why’s that, d’you reckon? What have I just been telling you?”
“You haven’t been telling me anything; you’ve been shouting at me. And what you’ve actually been doing is making excuses. I’m on your side, Tom, but you need to face a few facts. You’re either completely out of it or
